Rescued From Paradise

by Robert L. Forward

  "I'm adding another room to my hut. This will be the roof, and I'll use sod bricks for the walls."

  "Why so strong? So sturdy? Is no wild animals to break down door. You only trap the heat!"

  Cinnamon smiled. In truth, the "town" that had sprung up around their campsite brought to mind the story of the Three Little Pigs, with each person or couple building homes to suit their own preferences. Her own round hut was as close as she could make in this tropical climate to the igloos she and her brothers had made in the Alaskan winters. Arielle had a fairy's bower, light and leafy, situated halfway up a tree. Jinjur and Shirley shared a hut made with a nod to General Jinjur Jones's military precision, all square-sided and right-angled, but Engineer Shirley Everett had added a pitched roof to shed the frequent rain. Carmen Cortez, the communications technician, had moved into a utilitarian pup tent made of peethoo saplings and feebook leaves next to the penetrator carrying the communicator that served as their link to those above. Richard Redwing had set up a tepee and moved Reiki LeRoux in with him after he learned that Josephine had chosen him to be the father of Reiki's child.

  Only John Kennedy and Nels Larson still slept in the original lean-to the crew had used as their shelter during those early hectic days when they were first marooned, but the group still shared communal meals around the cooking fire. The hormonal "Leaps and Bounces" (as Arielle called it) of pregnancy had encouraged the women to seek privacy, but this tiny band of humans stranded on an alien world still gained strength and comfort from their nightly ritual of holding hands around the fire before the evening meal.

  Now, as the glowing red globe of Barnard started to lower into the ruddy clouds of sunset, people were slowly straggling back up the beach from whatever explorations and experiments had occupied them for the day. Not that they didn't have domestic chores as well, but on this tropic paradise, they could divide things to suit personal preferences.

  Arielle had been the pilot. Now that her wings had been clipped, she wandered the island gathering firewood and collecting small samples of the indigenous flora. She was making a map of their home marked with more practical aspects of the island than the photo surveys made by Prometheus.

  Cinnamon had started out as the fire-builder ("Keeper of the Flame" according to Richard) and normally stayed close to it. Gradually, Cinnamon had taken over many of the humdrum chores that would have tied the others down. Now she dried the herbs and ground the grain at the little water mill. She also did much of the mending and laundering, and took care of a myriad of little household tasks that the others barely noticed. Shirley had become a Jack-of-all-trades, using her engineering skills to come up with solutions for problems that hindered the work of the others.

  Reiki took her raft out every day and brought back whatever fish or sea plants the others had asked of her. Reiki also took care of the "chamber pots" that she emptied each morning into Necessity Beach. At first they had just gone to the distant beach whenever the need arose, but as the women's pregnancies progressed, the need for a closer nightly relief station became apparent. Fortunately, among the salvaged items from the lander were many large rectangular plastic containers with lip-locking lids. Originally designed for use in storing large mineral or biological samples, they had been pressed into more mundane use. The ammonia from the urine collected was crucial for the well-being of the flouwen, so not a drop was wasted. Indeed, Reiki was often greeted at the beach by the cheerful free-flowing blobs of color as they waited for their daily dose. The flouwen had quickly learned not to say anything to the prim Reiki about the load she carried.

  Richard and Jinjur had taken over much of the hunting, managing to gather many different species of the local fauna, either with traps, slings, or Jinjur's longbow. The nightly ordeal of taste-testing each organ of each separate species for toxins was for the most part over. They had learned what they could eat and what they should avoid. At first, the humans had been afraid of interfering with the local ecology. But since the humans met the Jolly Blue-Green Giants, the intelligent plantlike aliens who lived on the island, they were reassured. Now, the castaways considered fair game those animals the Jollys also preyed upon. Indeed, the Jollys were thankful that the more agile humans were willing to help cut back on the small green-furred vermin that often nibbled at the roots of their protective thorn-wall hedges.

  John was kept busy examining samples of the local foodstuffs with the biologists, Cinnamon Byrd and Nels Larson, trying to determine the nutritional values they contained. Now that the humans were reliant on the native food, it was vital that they learn just how well their diet would support them. The alien foods were mostly carbohydrates and seemed to be nutritious, but the proteins were different from Earth proteins, and with no equipment to analyze the food, or how well the humans were assimilating and utilizing it, the threat of severe malnutrition hung over them like a cloud.

  There had been long debates about exactly what supplies they should include in the limited payload of the tiny crawler that would bring them true necessities from Prometheus. Anything they could get along without, anything the planet would supply, should be left out to make way for something else. Ironically, the equipment needed to analyze the content of their diet was still operative in the submerged airplane in the center of Crater Lagoon, but to get there involved a difficult and potentially dangerous journey in a jury-rigged "diving bell" and there were thousands of samples to test.

  David Greystoke, a computer programmer of artistic temperament, was now spending most of his days with the slow-moving Jollys. At the moment he and Shirley were studying and recording the Jolly colony's day-to-day activities on one of the few pieces of their old technology left to them: a small pocket-sized electronic notebook that had been Reiki's personal diary. Each day, David and Shirley filled its electronic memory with notes and still-scan pictures, which Carmen transmitted back to the Prometheus at night. Carmen spent most of her time down on the beach monitoring their communications link to the life they had lost. Slowly she and the flouwen had managed to salvage pieces of communication equipment from the sunken lander. She was working to enlarge the original setup to include a flouwen taste-screen in the shallow waters. Now, the little señorita, so round with pregnancy that she was almost spherical, came bouncing up the beach. She was squeezing the water out of her long black curls.

  "Finally, I really think I've done it!" Carmen said. "The Littles can now use their own taste-screen to make direct contact with the commsat net. They've even exchanged messages with their primary selves back on Rocheworld! The round-trip delay time was about three minutes, but that's nothing to the flouwen. From now on, the flouwen can talk to Rocheworld or Prometheus without me or someone else having to act as intermediary."

  At the mention of the name of their former home, the two sitting on the ground automatically glanced up in the sky at the flat ellipse rising on the opposite side of the sky from the setting sun. The large multistory habitat that contained their nine companions was a mere speck in the three-hundred-kilometer-diameter aluminum moon reflecting the light from the setting sun. For the past few months, Prometheus had been off doing surveys from orbit of Gargantua's many moons. It was now on its way back for the first of the provision drops. After a pause, Arielle and Cinnamon returned their attention to Carmen, and she continued.

  "Of course, trying to waterproof the connection from the taste-screen to the power umbilical was a challenge. But you know those greens that John said must have latex in them?"

  "Remember? It was me, tasted first!" said Arielle, spitting into the sand. "Can still taste it!"

  "Well, they may taste awful," said Carmen, "but after I boiled up a lot of them, I skimmed off enough sticky stuff to waterproof the power leads. As long as the flouwen don't bump it too much, it should hold."

  Jinjur and Richard had joined them quietly, dropping their crudely gutted game animals for Cinnamon to butcher with their one good knife—Shirley's Swiss Army Mech-All. "You expect the flouwen to be careful?"
Jinjur asked incredulously.

  While the flouwen had proved to be very intelligent, solving complicated mathematical theorems for fun, most of them seemed to have the temperaments of eight-year-olds. Of the three flouwen buds stranded here with them on Eden—Little Red, Little White, and Little Purple—only Little White acted maturely, although all three of them were many hundreds of years old. Little Purple was well over a thousand.

  "Well, Little Red might accidentally break something, but frankly, I doubt he will be using it much. He is too busy surfing in the waves to talk to Prometheus, while Little Purple spends most of his time rocked up in the shallows, thinking. Little White, however, is always careful, and I'm certain he doesn't want to lose the opportunity to have talks with George." Carmen smiled. The milky-white flouwen had met his soul mate in the human physicist. The two of them could talk of science for hours, and Little White had been looking forward to renewing the contact.

  "Gracias a Dios, I didn't have to rewire the taste-screen itself ... I'd never have been able to manage without any real tools. Ouch!" Carmen interrupted herself and clutched her belly. Then she laughed. "That must be an elbow. I know she is keeping her head buried deep against my bladder."

  "Must we?" asked Reiki, arriving. The prim anthropologist was constantly trying to keep the rest of them civilized despite their primitive conditions. She had met David and Shirley on the way back to Council Rock, and now David was carrying her catch. He handed the carefully cleaned fish to Arielle, who impaled the fillets on sticks and began to sprinkle the pale pink flesh with spices prior to setting them before the fire to bake. Reiki and Shirley lowered themselves awkwardly into the sand with the other women.

  "Yes, we must!" Carmen bridled. "As it happens, we need to talk about pee. While I was working on getting power to the flouwen's taste-screen, I wasn't about to go off and use Necessity Beach every time I felt the need. Besides, Little White was right there, so it wasn't wasted. John! Come here a minute! You need to hear this, too."

  John and Nels were coming down the beach from the woods. At Carmen's call, John gave the tubers he was carrying to Nels and sprinted to her side and slipped his arm around her.

  "Everything okay with Junior?" he asked, patting her stomach.

  "Of course ... or at least I suppose so. I was too busy to think about it much. It was Little White. He said that ... well ... that my urine tasted different. He used the taste-screen to communicate with James about it, and after a little discussion about how to discriminate between different tastes, they both agreed that it was glucose. That doesn't mean anything bad does it? He said there was only a tiny bit ..." Carmen trailed off, growing more and more alarmed as John just looked at her, eyes wide. In desperation she turned a stricken face to Cinnamon. "It's not too bad is it? Is there something wrong with the baby?"

  "Oh, Carmen, it's nothing, really," said Cinnamon as she struggled to her feet. "A trace of glucose in the urine is sometimes a sign of diabetes."

  "Diabetes! Aye Dios Mio! Diabetics aren't suppose to have babies! How can we get insulin on this rock!?!" Carmen was becoming hysterical.

  "No, no," said Cinnamon soothingly. "Mild diabetes during pregnancy is quite common. And we won't need insulin; it can be easily controlled with diet. John? John! Tell her!"

  John had just been sitting there with a dazed look. Then he took Carmen's face in his hands and kissed her soundly.

  "The flouwen detected glucose in Carmen's urine!" he yelled and began dancing around the beach.

  Reiki shook her head despairingly as John continued yelling, chanting, and dancing up the beach toward Nels. John shook Nels's shoulders as he repeated his cry. Nels dropped the tubers and joined in, "The flouwen detected glucose in Carmen's urine!"

  "What are you doing? Have you no heart? I am sick! Your baby is sick!" Carmen, furious after the scare, was stomping over to the two men cavorting in the sand. The rest of the group trailed along behind her.

  "Don't you see?" said Nels, turning to her as she approached. "The flouwen use taste to communicate thoughts—even thoughts as complex as mathematical theorems. In order to do that, they must have developed a marvelously accurate sense of taste. Since they can detect and identify large molecules like glucose in your urine, then they should be able to detect the various other molecules in our foodstuffs. They can assure us that we are getting all the vitamins and minerals we need to stay healthy!"

  "All these months!" crowed John. "All these months, I've been trying to figure out what each thing we ate supplied to our bodies, and let me tell you folks, it has been hell!" John laughed.

  The spectators looked at each other amazed, and it dawned on all of them just how long it had been since any of them had heard John laugh.

  "I was trying to figure out ways to test for these compounds while watching the reactions of our bodies as we ate various foods. I didn't want to worry the rest of you, but let's face it, I was guessing and hoping, terrified that I might be missing some little thing!" Relief colored his voice. "That, even if there was a vitamin present in some kind of food, it might not be in a form we could assimilate! Vitamins, minerals, amino acids, we may need only tiny amounts, but to be without them can be disastrous. How could I have been so stupid? Floating out in the water we have our own chemistry labs!"

  "No taste-test for us tonight, then!" called out Jinjur. "Tonight we eat only our favorites and tomorrow we let the flouwen start doing the tasting!"

  "We'll be able to figure exactly what vitamins the native food is giving us, and what vitamins we'll need to have supplements for, then tell James up on Prometheus," said Nek. "Just think of the savings in space, think of the tools we'll be able to bring down instead!" With a broad smile he reached out and took John's hand. Slowly, one by one, the little band of humans linked hands in a circle around the fire.

  LOADING

  SAM HOUSTON was up on the top "workbench" deck of Prometheus. The four-meter-diameter central shaft in front of him was filled with a doughnut-shaped elevator platform that moved heavy items up and down the shaft. On the platform was a robotic amphibious crawler with a boatlike hull about one meter wide, two meters long, and a half-meter high. Along each side of the crawler there were treads with paddles built in, so the vehicle could operate equally well on land or on water. On the side of the hull, near the front, the word "Spritz" had been written in script on the crawler in bright blue. Spritz had video camera eyes, long articulated arms folded up along its topside that could reach any part of the crawler to effect repairs, and numerous communication antennae, but its commodious hull had been stripped of sensing and survey instruments, and its doors now were folded back as it waited for the last of its cargo.

  On the opposite side of the central shaft from Sam, Caroline was operating the automated mechanical fabrication facility that took up one quarter of the twenty-meter-diameter workbench deck. The machinery was humming as it produced a complex part that Caroline had just designed on its control console. The chemical analyses that the flouwen had carried out on the native foods of Eden had lessened the requirement for nutrition supplements, leaving a number of kilograms free on Spritz for tools and other useful items. One versatile tool requested by those below had been more Swiss Army Mech-Alls. Caroline had modified the basic design by removing a number of screwdriver tips useful only for repairs of complex machinery and replacing them with a selection of knife blades, saws, awls, files, and cutters more suitable for the primitive environment of Eden.

  Sam heard a rustle behind him and turned around as the Christmas Bush exited the chemical fabrication facility which took up that quarter of the workbench deck The chemical facility was not designed for entry by humans. It consisted of racks and racks of molecular analyzing and synthesizing equipment which reached from floor to ceiling along a serpentine corridor ten centimeters wide.

  The elongated Christmas Bush oozed from the narrow corridor like a glittering tongue of metallic ice crystals and reformed itself on the floor. Two of its branches graspe
d the looped carpeting and brought it erect, while one of its branches bushed out into a "head". The laser diodes built into the tips of the fine shoots and the joints of the thicker sticks flashed briefly as the Christmas Bush took in its surroundings. Blue lasers established communication links with similar lasers built into the corners and crevices of the room; yellow lasers determined the position and orientation of all moveable objects in the room; while red lasers carefully scanned the humans, noting every nuance of facial position and posture. A green laser from a ceiling fixture brightened as power was transferred from the ship to the main trunk of the Christmas Bush, where it was distributed by green beams down through the boughs, branches, twigs, sticks, and shoots, turning the metallic structure green with scattered light. It was during this recharging phase, with the red, yellow, and blue laser lights blinking out from its green branches, that the Christmas Bush looked most like its name. A portion of the head of the Bush vibrated, and James spoke from the Bush.

  "This is the last packet of mineral supplements." The Bush showed Sam the carefully wrapped package, walked to Spritz, and inserted it into the cargo hold with its one good arm appendage. The other two arms of the Bush consisted only of truncated main boughs, for their subdivisions were busy elsewhere on the ship as Christmas Branches, one in the galley preparing the next meal for the crew, and one on the hydroponics deck helping Deirdre O'Connor, now that the other two biologists who had made up the hydroponics deck crew, Nels Larson and Cinnamon Byrd, were trapped down on Eden.

  DEIRDRE sighed, the small sound only accenting the silence of the hydroponics deck. For many years she had worked in these long racks of plants ... here where a tiny piece of Earth was blossoming so far from home. Always before there had been, from somewhere else in the growing green or echoing down the rows of algae tanks, the sound of song. But Cinnamon was no longer here helping to tend the gardens, tanks, and tissue cultures, singing from her endless repertoire of old songs, and Deirdre missed her. Deirdre ran her fingers through the tiny dry seeds ... grains, peas, beans, tomatoes, and other vegetables. They had been painstakingly gathered for the last several months and now would be sent down to the planet surface. The vitamins in these Earth crops could mean the difference between life and death to the castaways. Meticulously Deirdre and a Christmas Branch sorted each variety, choosing the best seeds and carefully labeling them. Two dozen little sacks, each filled with only a few grams of matter ... it seemed almost wrong that they should be so important.